


the taming of the shrew (and by the shrew, Thomas Blanky means a giant flesh-eating ice demon; and Tuunbaq means a puny one-legged human)

by potted_music



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Other, Tentacles, because sometimes hands don't suffice to handwave all character deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-21 01:09:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14905635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potted_music/pseuds/potted_music
Summary: Love makes fools of the most sensible men: some lose their heads, some their sleep, and some their hearts. Thomas Blanky, nothing if not level-headed, lost his leg, and that's even before his sweetheart and he were properly introduced. Well, we all make our sacrifices, don't we?





	1. Chapter 1

Love makes fools of the most sensible men: some lose their heads, some their sleep, and some their hearts. Thomas Blanky, nothing if not level-headed, lost his leg, and that's even before his sweetheart and he were properly introduced. Well, we all make our sacrifices, don't we?

"What in the name of God took you so fucking long?" he asks, baring his teeth, when he hears shingles creak and slide under its heavy paws.

The question answers itself soon enough. The moment the creature crests the hill, it becomes painfully obvious that, much like he supposed all those months and many a mishap ago, the beast is sick, either from gobbling up too much of the good English lead-infused stock, or from cannon and rocket hits. It lurches from side to side as it walks, and its coat is a patchwork of balding and singed areas. All told, it reminds him of a mangy dog he fed and his father shot when he was a boy. Fleabag, that’s what he called the pup, Thomas remembers with sudden clarity across the distance of years, and his stomach curls with helpless sympathy for the long-dead wretch.

"You are dying too, you piss-poor excuse of a lame devil's spawn," Thomas says, not without a note of pity, and adds in Inuktitut, supplanting in tone what he lacks in vocabulary, "We both die here, you tapeworm in the arse end of the world."

It does not come out sounding quite as rich, but that's all he has words for. 

If he didn’t know better, he’d say that the creature frowned its weird, wide, almost human face with surprise. But the moment is gone almost before it registers, and then the beast plops down flat on its mangy arse like a dog, scratches the burned hide on its shoulder with a hind leg, and, for all intents and purposes, settles to admire the view of the frozen wind-swept bay.

A right pair they make, he thinks: a gangrenous one-legged man and a mad half-dead deity or demon, awaiting death within sight of the most jealously coveted geographic feature of their enlightened and progressive era. Well, fuck him if he doesn't wait to see the beast expire first. He has already spent nearly a lifetime up in the crow’s nest, frozen and bored within an inch of his life, waiting for the ice conditions, the weather and the ship’s capabilities to align in one perfect moment that changes the course of history and makes the wait worthwhile, so how much worse can this be, really? What he’s saying is, he’s no beginner at waiting. The beast found the wrong bastard to pester.

*

The sun sets and comes up again, and the beast has not budged from its spot. For a moment, Thomas dares to hope that it croaked in the fleeting late summer night, but when he starts to crawl towards it, grunting with pain in his stump, it opens its tiny unnerving yellow eyes. There’s a quick inhuman intellect in those eyes, and, what's somehow even worse, a hint of irony, incongruous against the hulking mass of fur and claws. In that instant, it is unclear which one of them is more of an animal: the beast with piercing eyes, or the man turned dumb and beastly with pain that makes him writhe and yelp. After a while, he raises his palms in a conciliatory gesture and leaves the thing be, for now at least.

He briefly regrets not taking a flask of water off Francis, not that the expenditure could be justified. He rakes his palm through old snow between two boulders, and half-melts it in his hands before losing patience and lapping it all up, crunchy ice crystals and all. Ignoring hungry pangs in his stomach, he keeps rummaging for snow and licking his fingers, enjoying his breakfast of ice while watching large blocks of that same substance rub against the edge of the shore, sighing and docile like cows.

"Come, little deer," he croons at the beast in Inuktitut. "Come, you long ridiculous creature. Tuunbaq- that’s what they call you, right?"

When he hears the beast stir behind him, he clasps a fork firmer in his fist, but it does not come any closer.

*

Dying, it transpires, is a slow and boring business, or at least he's not half-good at it. Well, we all learn in due time, he thinks. It might do him well to concoct a plan, just to take his mind off things, but his leg hurts too much, the part he lost on Terror all those months ago. And so they just lie there shivering, he and the creature both, scant yards away from one another.

As his mind starts to drift, lost and disoriented in the fog rolling off the ice and invisible leads through dark water, a thought suddenly shines through the murk: killing the thing is just one way of keeping it away from the crew. Making sure it stays here with him is another. He takes a long sceptical look at the beast. Malicious and inventive it definitely is, but there’s no knowing whether it is sentient in the human meaning of the word: whether it understands language, for one, or has a language all its own; whether it knows what storytelling is, or cares for imaginary things the way men care about taxation, royalty, religion and the Empire. Eh, it’s worth a try, he thinks—a guiding principle that served him well over the years. If need be, he can spin a yarn for a thousand and fucking one night with the best of them.

He clears his throat noisily, out of necessity as much as to draw the creature’s attention, and sticks out an accusatory finger in its direction. "Right, I bet you haven’t heard this one. This one’s about a fucking mermaid. Or about fucking a mermaid, as the case might be. It takes a very special kind of mind to look at what is little more than a glorified fish, and think, you’ll do, agreed?"

His Inuktitut is not built to accommodate storytelling, developed primarily to tease out details of topography and ice conditions, but he makes it stretch. If he’s completely honest with himself, the story’s not even all that funny, but the creature is a good listener, barely interrupting him except for occasional huffs and snorts that almost sound like chuckles. 

“Between you and me,” Thomas says with a hoarse laugh by way of wrapping up the tale, “all this talk about mermaids, when you get right down to it, is just a boy taking one good long look at a seal and thinking, ‘I wonder if I could stick my prick in that.’”

The creature yawns, baring its oddly human teeth, as if showing all its endless disdain for that logic.

Thomas takes a deep breath and rolls up the left leg of his trousers to poke a finger at the rotting flesh of the stump. Black skin makes an uncomfortable crackling sound: something about the build-up of putrid gases in the flesh, if memory serves. He hopes he lasts long enough for his friends to put a decent number of miles between them and the beast, but for now, he is so very tired. When darkness starts to crawl at the edges of his vision—sleep or unconsciousness, either one or the other—he welcomes the peaceful quiet devoid of sensations.

*

He comes to with a feeling of warmth spreading through his body and none of the familiar aches and tingles that plague one after dozing on an uneven rough surface. He doesn’t open his eyes at once, floating instead in the warm red ocean on the inner side of his eyelids, lulled by the even, deep, rhythmic murmur of waves rising and falling around him. If this is what dying feels like, he thinks with acquiescence, then it’s not half-bad.

Judging by the position of the sun, it’s been a good number of hours since he fell asleep, he realizes when he finally makes an effort and opens his eyes. The second realization comes fast on the heels of the first: what he initially mistook for the sound of the waves is in fact the laboured rattling breathing of a very large animal up close. When he musters up all his courage and raises his gaze, he meets the eyes of the creature leaning over him, blocking out the sun with its gargantuan bulk and clogging his nostrils with the smell of wet fur, old blood and empty distant places that should never come so near. What’s possibly worse, there’s a sandpapery tongue lapping, or rather scratching at his stump. The creature could have torn him limb from limb, killing him mercifully in his sleep, but, clearly, he is to expect no such grace: it’s intent on taking its time. The touch of its tongue is less painful than he’d expect it to be, but then, he frankly cannot say that he ever imagined this scenario, and what remains of his leg is dying anyway, so the point is moot. He allows himself a moment of animalistic horror, the dumb paralyzing fear of a very small rodent that had heard the swift swoosh of owl wings, and then he steels himself for action.

"I don't usually let anybody this close to my crotch without having a pint with them first," he rasps, casting about for his fork. You'd probably need a proper whaling harpoon to pierce the creature’s skull, but he stands a chance if he goes for the eye, sticks the fork in as deep as it’d go, and twists. He is at just the right striking distance now. And yet, neither the fork he kept on hand, nor the twisted ones with the prongs sticking out every which way that he positioned strategically on his body, are anywhere in sight. The beast must have somehow managed to untangle or cut his coil of rope without waking him. He lifts his head to look around, and sees the forks some ten yards away. For all intents and purposes, they might as well be over the mountains of the moon. And yet, he makes a valiant effort to crawl back towards them, using mostly his elbows for purchase. He does not get more than a scant handful of inches away though before a heavy front paw, easily the length of his arm or more, lands on his chest, and pins him in place. Its insistent weight makes breathing hard, partly with fear, partly with the pressure. There’s a hint of sharp claws, palpable even through layers of clothing: they are half a breath away from piercing his flesh and sinking deep into his ribcage, but remain a silent threat for now.

All that remains to him is to watch in fascinated horror as the creature's obscenely long and obscenely red tongue darts in and out of its maw, lapping at his flesh in what almost feels like a twisted caress. There's a charnel smell coming from the thing's mouth—the reminder of the fate met by his companions, and God knows what other miserable wretches it managed to hunt down in this desolate place—not to mention the stench of his own rotting meat, an olfactory experience all men should have been spared, if there was a just God above. But, mercifully, there's very little pain, and after a while, he begins to suspect that the creature might be venomous, its poison working slowly but inexorably on his perceptions, for the warmth curling in his chest, the exotic glow that woke him up, turns almost sensual if not outright sexual in nature. If he could just close his eyes and forget his circumstances, he would have gladly sunk into the feeling of being competently handled and fondled, the comfort of insistent touches, the happy reprieve from his misery. But that pretence is denied him, and his gaze flutters helplessly between the thing’s insistent tongue and its eyes, apprehensive and, it seems to him for a moment, riddled with the same fear of the unknown that he himself feels.

When the creature finally withdraws to admire its handiwork, what is left is a neat, clean-looking wound. It has licked away all the rot and gunk, leaving nothing but healthy, pink, glistening flesh. Unless sepsis sets in again, Thomas realizes with breathless wonder, he might still have a chance. His wooden leg is broken, yes, and if the island offers any game to hunt, it has yet to manifest itself, not that he has anything to hunt it with, but this taunting sliver of hope is more than he had several hours previously, so he’ll take it, thank you very much. He might have to crawl and hop for a while until he reaches their former campsite, and then improvise himself a leg of whatever castoffs remain there. Unless Hickey’s mutineers have already plundered the campsite, he might even stock up on provisions. He wishes he could later say that he had never once thought about the other kind of castoffs marking their trail like grisly caches, but he cannot afford squeamishness if he, hobbled as he is, wants to catch up with his friends before they cross over to the mainland. But then, there’s the matter of the creature to take into consideration. He cannot lead it right back to the crew, now, can he?

He curls up on himself, hugging his knees to his chest, and lets out a silent howl. Frustration mixed with hope mixed with horror wreak havoc in his rational brain, but he knows that he will work something out, because he always does. Before long, the creature plops down and nestles him in its thick fur until he stops shivering, and soon its breathing goes slow and rumbling with sleep, soothing like the distant sighs of ice rising and falling, rising and falling since the dawn of days.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought it'd be 2 chapters, but the fic sprouted another chapter in the writing. Yay, I guess.

When he wakes up next, this time from the sleep blissfully free of feverish nightmares, there’s a fat dead seal, spilled blood still steaming in the early morning chill, right next to him.

“When I shared my seal theory of mermaids, I meant that as an aside, not a polite request,” he grumbles, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “Besides, most humans have an unexplainable compunction about having congress with things without a pulse, you know.”

He doesn’t have to look back over his shoulder to know exactly where, and how close to him, the creature is, its position betrayed by its rattling breathing, as well as a sense he has no words for, an instinctive awareness of the other’s presence that usually comes of long coexistence and relying on your companion for survival. As if in answer, the thing lets out a polite little growl.

“If you want to fatten me up for a feast, let me tell you that it shall take a while, so you might as well not bother,” he says suspiciously, stretching and rolling his shoulders to work out the kinks in his stiff joints.

There are soft steps behind him, cautious and slow, as if it was trying not to scare him. Its shadow envelops him whole, bringing the darkness of other places and a stale winter smell of old snow and wet wool. When the creature walks into his field of vision, its ribs are prominent like planks of a ship’s hull under its matted fur.

“Good morning, pretty,” he says, doing his best to swallow saliva bitter with fear. 

The thing cocks its head to one side, as if straining to understand him better, and then flicks its ears in resignation, leans down and nudges the seal closer to him with its nose. The gesture leaves a smudge of blood on the side of its snout, making it look somewhat buffoonish.

Thomas incredulously pokes at the jagged edge of the wound on the seal’s belly with his finger. While he would be the first to admit that he prefers his Yorkshire pudding well-baked and with no marine mammals whatsoever, his empty stomach is well past such petty culinary distinctions, and rumbles with hunger to illustrate the point. The meal poses a practical challenge though. He might be half a breath away from flopping down on his belly and tearing at the fresh meat with his teeth, but he is not yet ready for that last step that would eliminate another distinction between him and the creature.

“I don’t have a knife,” he throws up his hands emphatically. “If I had, you wouldn’t be here. And then, neither would I.”

The creature barks out what almost sounds like a laugh, and carefully lowers its bulk onto the ground. With the creature lying down and him sitting up, they are at eye level now: throw in some fine china and silver cutlery, and they could be having polite conversation over tea and biscuits, as easy as you please. The laugh dies in his throat though when the creature bares its teeth, dips down in a movement almost too swift to register, and comes up with a bloody scrap of seal meat in its mouth.

“See,” he rasps, his throat suddenly dry, “I cannot do that.” He snarls and clacks his teeth once for good measure.

He thinks he can see the exact moment when comprehension dawns on the creature, insofar as it is capable of human thought, which he is more than certain it is. It stretches out its neck and leans towards him, the bleeding piece of meat held firmly in its mouth. Thomas recoils on instinct, but then, when it nods its head, making the meat flap, reaches out a hand.

These teeth crushed his tibia like a flimsy matchstick not that long ago. The thing is capable of biting off half a grown man’s skull without breaking a sweat, and hunts polar bears out of sheer pettiness. It beggars belief that it would patiently hold a cut of meat for him as a peace offering, and Thomas has nothing but the indifferent sky by way of witnesses to the incredible scene. It takes him several tries before he musters up enough courage to grab the meat, bringing his fingers to within scant inches of Tuunbaq’s teeth, but once his grip closes on the meat, the creature lets go instantly. Afterwards, it pins the seal to the ground with a heavy paw, like a dog holding down a particularly delectable bone, and takes a bite.

He wipes off its saliva with his sleeve as best he can, and, nodding in gratitude, lifts the meat to his mouth. Carefully ignoring the creature’s satisfied grunts and the wet cracks of breaking bones, he bites on the meat, and bites again, and twists, trying to chew on it with his molars, to no avail. Seal meat is proving too tough for his teeth, loose as they are with scurvy. To think that his teeth once crushed walnuts, earning him somewhat unfortunate nicknames, he muses, shaking his head, and proceeds to stubbornly lick and suck at the slice. Seal blood tastes rank, but it, too, should help, either to quiet the hungry pangs in his stomach, or as an antiscorbutic, he tells himself against the rising angry despair at having the meal within his grasp, yet not being able to eat it. It’s not until some minutes later that he notices the creature observing him intently.

“I cannot chew it,” he says with a shrug, downplaying his anger as best he can, though not quite as well as he’d like. “If we could just nip back to the campsite, I’m sure I could find a pot to cook it in.”

That’s it, that’s the end of its patience, and of his life to boot, he thinks, as the thing lunges towards him, its triangular head breathing fresh blood right into his face.

“I’m not ordering you about,” he says firmly. “But if you’d rather I didn’t starve-”

Before he can finish though, the creature grabs the meat out of his hand, its lips brushing against his palm with unexpected gentleness.

“If the idea of spoiling perfectly good meat with fire offends you so much,” he says as the creature chews thoughtfully on his failure of a breakfast, “you might have chosen the wrong companion for your meal. Unless you are keeping me for dessert, that is,” he adds as the creature opens its mouth and rolls the chewed meat pulp around with its tongue.

Without closing its mouth, it leans closer.

“That sort of table manners is generally frowned upon,” he says, breathing in the smell of fresh meat and the creature’s breath, without much choice in the matter. Unrelenting, it lets out a whine and nods its head, splattering his lap with specks of meat and saliva, before positioning its open jaws right in front of his face.

It intends to feed him the way birds feed their nestlings, he realizes as the creature grumbles again, more insistently this time. The idea is as horrifyingly repulsive as it is unsanitary, and yet this misguided kindness, reaching across old enmities, losses and deaths, on his side as well as its, leaves an unfamiliar wet prickle in his eyes. In all likelihood, they are both doomed, so it might come to nothing that this creature, so aggressively, defiantly, markedly inhuman, had made an attempt to understand the needs of a human and help, as best it can; and yet, it has got to count for _something_.

“Why me though?” he asks, trying to catch its gaze. “Why now? You’ve been hunting us for so long, so why keep me alive?”

The creature, predictably, doesn’t deign to answer. He closes his eyes, to blink away the tears as much as in a purely practical gesture, and leans down towards the maw that is big enough to fit his head in. He’s not fully certain the creature is not venomous, he thinks as their lips touch briefly. Its whiskers tickle at his nose. He gags a bit when the warm bloody mush fills his mouth—astringent in a way seal meat usually is, and with an added tang of something unfamiliar—but does his best to swallow. Then he takes a good measuring look at the creature, at its sunk cheeks under almost human cheekbones, at the burst capillaries in its eyes, at the scars furrowing its sides.

“Is it because nobody wants to die alone?” he asks, wiping at his lips with the back of his palm. He almost expects it to answer, for else his own solitude would be without reprieve, unbearable. It doesn’t, opening its mouth instead to show off the remaining meaty pulp. The view is uniquely unappetizing, he has to admit, but he wants to live.

Their meal continues like that, the creature gulping down huge chunks without chewing before carefully mushing other slices for him. Remembering the dangers of overeating after a prolonged fast, he eventually refuses further treats, but sets aside several sturdier bones from the seal’s fins to fashion himself a short knife.

*

The exercise soon proves even less comfortable than riding a horse, and he was never good at riding horses to begin with, much preferring the comforts of a buggy, a ship, or even walking within reasonable distance, reasonable distance being a very relative category when the alternative is this.

“I’ll just hop along. Don’t wait for me,” he chokes after sliding off the creature’s back for the third time in a row and hitting his stump on the shingles. The creature gurgles in what he’d bet good money was a hearty laugh.

“Well, maybe you should have followed Lady Silence then,” he says petulantly, kicking at its giant paw with his good leg. The creature does a comical pantomime of lifting the limb with an offended pout on its snout before obediently lying down and helping him crawl back up onto its back with careful nudges of its nose.

If he’s dissatisfied with the bumpy ride, the creature is none too happy to carry him either. It’s often out of breath, and stops to lie down and take a rest every couple of miles or so. And yet, they lurch stubbornly on, often veering off to the side, now for a large flat sun-warmed stone to stretch their bones on, now for a small bay rich in seals. It takes some time before he manages to overlay their zigzagging route with the map in his head, only to go cold with dread. For whatever reason, the creature is headed back for the ships, if they are still there, that is; if the ice has not opened up to let Terror sail south, and to sink the badly compromised Erebus. But before they reach the final stretch that would surely take them there, the creature turns rapidly to the side, deep into the maze of ice ridges and serracs. As far as Thomas can remember, the area holds no particular attractions, but there’s no knowing the creature’s reasoning.

The creature half-walks, half-slides on its arse into a small hollow cupped by steep walls of ice and shakes him unceremoniously to the ground, as is its habit, before he notices a familiar shade of red in the snow. He has to crawl a bit before he gets a chance to verify his guess, not that there was anything else in this shade in this land as stingy with colours as it was with everything else. It is, without a doubt, an empty Goldner tin can. Looking around and rifling through the snow, he manages to find a scrap of canvas, a broken tent pole that will have to serve him as a cane until he finds something better, and a torn and bloodied Welsh wig. This, then, is the camp of the group led by the ill-fated Lt. Gore. He looks up fast, searching for Tuunbaq.

It’s hunched on the very edge of the hollow, lumpy and lonely against the pale empty sky. It sniffs noisily at the ground, and then presses its snout to the ice, breathing in. The hoarse noises it makes weave into an unmelodious tune, a lament as discordant as this looming shape rocking from side to side. Thomas is willing to bet that there’s blood of the last shaman Tuunbaq trusted somewhere in the snow.

The creature is lonely, he realizes, the last or maybe the only one of its kind, with a precarious and intermittent connection to humans. He gives it a moment to grieve, never sure whether it intended him to spy on this scene, before cupping his palms around his mouth and yelling, “Oy, come here.”

As the creature glides down in a small avalanche of fine snow and glittering shards of ice before plopping down at his feet, he tries to compose himself. “Back in England, I’d pour you a pint and look away while you had your moment,” he says, even though there’s nothing to say, not really. “Given you were not a giant ice demon, that is. Good thing we are not in England then.”

He hugs Tuunbaq’s scrawny neck, unsure whether ice demons even share the human understanding of comforting gestures, and awkwardly pats it on the shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says, leaning into the softer fur around its ears. The creature seems unimpressed, but it looks like they are stuck together, so that’ll have to suffice.

As they head up north, he thinks of his friends far to the south, inland, well on their way to Back’s Fish River. The alternatives are too painful to contemplate, so he doesn’t contemplate them.

*

In the watery light of waning days, Tuunbaq digs deep burrows in the ice and compressed snow from blizzards fallen in times immemorial, before the Romans came to conquer an island off the western coast of Europe, maybe even before its first inhabitants crossed the channel. This snow, Thomas realizes, will be here, serene and undisturbed, even after the Empire long turns to dust, and birds start nesting on the ruins of London. The ice shines deep blue on the inside, reflecting the dying light.

Thomas knows all sorts of ice: slush and rotten ice, pancake ice, drifting ice floes like pilgrims gravitating towards the pack; pressure ridges where two packs collide; anchor ice growing on the sea floor that can turn previously navigable straits shallow and perilous. He thought he knew all there was to know, and yet he knew nothing about this, completely indifferent and distant from his puny human concerns for navigation.

“Thank you,” he says, turning to his creature.

*

Around mid-September, when winter sets in for good, digging its claws into the frozen land, his creature ventures farther out onto the ice. It hunts polar bears, toying with them the way a cat toys with doomed mice. Thomas watches from a distance in horrified fascination. He never learns to enjoy the taste of bear meat, so Tuunbaq occasionally finds him seals: scant improvement, taste-wise, but familiar at least.

Right as his eyes despair of ever seeing any change in the sweeping, flat, ice-bound landscape around him, he spies smoke rising from what can only be a small campfire.

“Look!” he yells, pointing Tuunbaq in that direction. “Looks like we’ve got company!”

Tuunbaq seems unimpressed, wandering several steps away from the camp before Thomas leans perilously to the side, threatening to dismount and hop off on his lonesome. Well, in its centuries of wanderings, it must have seen thousands of such small camps, meagre protections of life against the encroaching winter, but Thomas has had no such luxury, and he intends to partake of it in full.

As his creature relents and saunters lazily in the right direction, Thomas rifles in his pockets for his looking glass. It’s been awhile since he last used it, and he almost makes the rookie mistake of touching cold metal to the unprotected skin of his brow. He needs practice. Moreover, he needs food that is not raw meat, and he needs human company. Once he manages to adjust focus, all his doubts disperse: they are riding towards a small Inuk party, comprised of three adult men, a hunting expedition most likely. Tuunbaq slows down as they approach, but Thomas urges it along, giddy with the anticipation of the forgotten joy of human companionship.

When they finally reach the circle of light from their small fire, two of the hunters yelp and reach for their spears, while one raises both his palms in a peaceful gesture. Tuunbaq, proving that he’s too powerful to ever have needed to develop common sense, growls not at the armed hunters but at the unarmed man.

“Would you please sit?” Thomas barks, and, after a moment’s hesitation, it does, much to the surprise of the party. Tuunbaq watches the men set aside their spears with what can best be described as polite disinterest, as Thomas smiles his brightest smile to make up for his creature’s lack of civility, and then slides down off its back.

“Greetings,” he rasps in Inuktitut possibly more formal than the situation calls for to compensate for his undignified sprawl on the snow.

The hunters gape at him in disbelief. “The keepers of the Tuungaq relinquish their right to speak with anybody but it,” one explains hesitantly. “And yet, you still have your tongue.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m its keeper,” Thomas says, clambering to stand up with as much dignity as his inadequate crutch allows. Tuunbaq watches him with amusement for a while before gently nudging him up with its nose. “We just travel together.”

If he were completely honest, he would say that it was Tuunbaq who kept him, rather than vice versa, as an extravagant and vociferous pet, not that he’d ever say so to another human being.

“It obeys you,” the man says, but does not get a chance to finish, interrupted by Thomas’s laughter.

Thomas knows that he should not be rude to people who know more about surviving Arctic winters on the ice than he ever will, but the assumption that this bulk of claws, malice and hunger could ever obey him is too patently absurd. After his mirth finally subsides, he rasps, “It ate my leg. Maybe it doesn’t care overmuch which limb or organ it takes.”

“The Tuungaq has kept up his part of the deal through generations: the sacrifice of speech in exchange for protection of this land.”

“Well, maybe speech is not the most important thing I could give up,” Thomas muses. “Dignity is more important, if you ask me. Have you ever tried taking a shit while balancing on one leg?”

Another hunter takes this as his cue to help Thomas sit down on their fur-covered sled, comfortably close to the fire. His creature makes a move to stand between Thomas and the man, but he gestures it down, mesmerized by the sight of very familiar buttons sewn onto the hunter’s coat. There are many things this could portend, not all of them tragic, so he doesn’t ask, and then the moment for asking passes.

“We were looking for the Tuungaq,” the first hunter continues. “We had had bad winters and lean summers ever since the old shaman was killed. We have a new shaman willing to take on the role of its keeper.”

Thomas looks quickly back over his shoulder to a spot in the darkness where he can feel Tuunbaq lurking, just outside the circle of light. It was right, he thinks fleetingly, we shouldn’t have come here; but he bites down on his apprehension. Much as he bristles at the assumption that this thing, incomprehensible and predatory, yes, but also cunning and with an instinct for beauty, could be passed around like a package, he does not know this life, nor the comforting routines of survival handed down through centuries, nor the darkness underneath their history.

A hunter hands him a bone cup of a brew that smells more delicious than anything he has ever tasted, and, as if reading his thoughts, says, “You mean well, but know little. Will you at least let our shaman talk to the Tuungaq?”

No, he wants to say; and doesn’t. Take your blood soup, and your warm fire, and your human speech, I want none of it, he wants to say; and doesn’t.

“It will end in blood otherwise, sooner rather than later. You know it will,” the hunter says, his voice thick with compassion. “We will take care of you. We will take you to your people. Just let him try.”

Fire twinkles and plays on the Navy buttons. At the edge of darkness, Tuunbaq growls, a sound like crackling ice, completely, undeniably inhuman, and he was a fool to ever think otherwise. The creature saved him, and fed him, and taught him to love this place, but how could he forget that all these gifts came at the price of relinquishing everything he ever were?

“Why not. Go,” he tells the creature in the dark before he has a chance to reconsider. “Go.”

He looks away quickly, and stares decidedly into the fire that drowns out the quiet shine of the ice under the stars with its uncompromising brightness.


	3. Chapter 3

After the shaman slips off into the darkness with barely a rustle of snow under his feet—a patch of condensed silence against the sweeping silence of the place, interrupted only by the groaning ice—Thomas tries to make polite conversation, to little effect, and then stops. It’s strange, he thinks while sipping the broth: he had never thought of the creature as silent or even particularly reticent. It huffs when amused, and growls when angry or hungry, and groans when tired or frustrated, and sings with joy or grief. This hardly amounts to an intellectually stimulating conversation, but as much can be said about many, if not most of his shipmates, and the creature has the benefit of being more sensitive to its interlocutor, by far. Imagining it slipping back into the prehistoric silence of legends and myths where it undoubtedly belongs is strange, and does not bring half the relief it should.

“Thank you,” the hunter says, “for keeping the Tuungaq safe, and for letting him go. It was the right thing to do.”

There is little doubt that it was indeed right for this place. It was right, too, not to steal the protector of the people from whom his crew had already stolen so many friends and loved ones, including a young child. Moreover, it was, undoubtedly, the right thing to do for himself, or else he would slip ever deeper into its inhuman orbit, for he revels in its proximity more than can be considered acceptable as it is. The only thing that remains unclear is whether he was doing right by the monster, but then, it can stand its ground more than adequately.

“I know.” Thomas nods. 

“Not all things that are right are easy,” the hunter says, and falls silent. There’s much he could be saying, starting with where Thomas’s crew is, and with each moment that the hunter prevaricates his doubts congeal into certainty.

“Neither are all things that are easy right,” Thomas says conversationally. Dying would have been easy. Hating the creature was easy, until it wasn’t. Living and loving, conversely, had to be fought for, tooth and claw, but he made a life of doing impossibly hard things anyway. Until now, that is. “So, what can be hunted here, other than bear and seal?” he asks just to drown out the encroaching hush.

“Not much,” the hunter says, obviously distracted, squinting into the dark, “not unless the Tuungaq goes back to taking proper care of the place.”

There are two things Thomas notices simultaneously: first, his knowledge of the creature’s history and place in this world is even patchier than he thought previously, to the extent that he considered the scope of his ignorance at all; second, his ignorance extends to mispronouncing its name for the last couple of years.

“The Tuungaq,” he repeats thoughtfully, and then shudders from a touch of distant fear, like a noxious smell carried by a whiff of wind. He has learned to trust his gut instincts, but this chill is different from the productive apprehension that can mean the difference between life and death. This is fear at one remove, not strong enough to cross over into panic, but not his to control. The words escape his lips before he has time to think them through. “Stop it, you are scaring it.”

Once said, there’s no walking back from that thought. He’s lived in the creature’s shadow for long enough by now to have learned its habits and moods, to feel what it feels through barely perceptibly shifts in the quality of air and light. That’s deeper knowledge, he realises belatedly, than he had of his wife back in Yorkshire, or of any of his ships, or any of his captains. In those cases, his understanding was always thorough, yet ultimately self-serving, whereas he knew the creature just because it was different, and present, and he couldn’t tear his eyes away from it if he tried. The only other passion in his life that could come even close to comparing was his love for the ice.

“He’s dangerous when unattached,” the hunter says, standing up to bar his way. “Your people saw what it can- will do.”

“Well, he’s mine now,” Thomas says, clambering to get up right as the sky seems to drop impossibly low, a weight of fear on his shoulders. The place, seemingly endless not a moment ago, suddenly turns oppressive, a closed box with musty unspoken things crawling under the lid, in the dark.

“You don’t understand. It guards the place. Do you know the history of this place?” Out in the darkness, Tuungaq growls.

“No,” Thomas says, adjusting his grip on his inadequate crutch.

“You must know the paths the animals take here then, to herd them towards their usual springtime routes.” There’s derision in the hunter’s voice, and something more primeval underneath: hunger for life, coupled with the knowledge that Thomas can make his chances, not great to begin with, dwindle into nonexistence.

“No,” Thomas says right as another growl shakes yards of ice under their feet. “But I can learn, and I know him. I know the Tuungaq, alright? I know when he hurts, I know when he’s hungry, I know when he’s so lonely his teeth are on edge, and maybe that’s not enough, but I will not let you do anything he doesn’t want. And, by God, my way of doing things is not the only way or the best way, not by a long shot, but maybe yours isn’t either.”

Two against one wouldn’t count as good odds under any circumstances, especially if it’s two able-bodied armed men against a one-legged opponent armed with nothing but a broken tent pole. This will get ugly, Thomas thinks baring his teeth, but he’ll give them a thing or two to remember. He takes a couple of hopping steps forward until he’s almost chest to chest with the hunter standing in his way. 

“Right,” he says, jutting out his chin, “this needn’t end in blood.”

Except it does, because blood is never too far from the surface anyway. The hunter barely has time to look bored with Thomas’s theatrics when there’s another hoarse roar from the darkness, followed by a human cry cut short.

The hunters take off at a trot towards the sound. He hops after them, crashing down face-first into the ice whenever his crutch hits a softer patch of snow. He starts out determined not to crawl in front of these people, but soon gives up and conquers some yards on all fours before getting up again. He has to make it in time, before something unknown and irreversible happens.

He barely has time to notice the familiar presence towering above him and to smell the charnel smell that has stopped being revulsive and terrifying at some unremarked point along their meandering trek—it’s just old blood, the record of generations of lives condensed into one creature—when the monster grabs him by the collar and gives him one vigorous shake, like a large dog disciplining an unruly pup. He’s so relieved he might cry.

The monster deposits him, ears still ringing from its idea of a greeting, on the ice. It takes Thomas a moment to realize that the pile of bloodied rags in front of him is all that remains of the shaman who walked off into the darkness with such confidence not a quarter hour previously. This used to be a man, and now hardly qualifies as a body: mere scraps of what, until moments ago, possessed a mind, an intelligence, memories and dreams. The creature insistently nudges him closer to what remains of the shaman.

Suddenly queasy, Thomas looks up at Tuungaq’s face to avoid looking at what’s right in front of him. This is nothing he has not seen before, he tells himself in order not to succumb to belated fear, and switches to English out of respect for the hunters. 

“If you think I’m eating that, mister, you are thoroughly mistaken.”

The creature, he’s fairly certain, understands the meaning if not the sentiment.

“He will kill you too, you know, sooner rather then later,” one of the hunters says, and the ancient madness of a creature born of desolate spaces in Tuungaq’s eyes does little to negate the warning.

“I’ll learn,” Thomas says loudly. “I’ll never be of this place, and there are things I will never understand in full, but whatever you think I should begin with, I’ll learn. Tell me where to come, and I will listen to everything you see fit to tell me. I don’t need to blunder in the dark and make this any more of a disaster than it already is.” And then he leans closer to Tuungaq and whispers into his ear, “Just don’t let this end in a disaster. They need you, and I need you, and I hope we have a deal, or else, help me God, I’ll have to fight you.”

Tuungaq has the decency to look mildly scandalized, a show belied by spatters of blood on his face. The hunters stay quiet for long enough to fill Thomas with foreboding, but then one utters what sounds like a name of the village: the place Thomas is unfamiliar with, but Tuungaq, hopefully, knows. When Thomas looks up at him, the monster puffs in assent, spraying him with spittle.

After a moment’s pause, Thomas musters enough courage to ask, “And where can I find my friends?”

Again, the silence stretches, but then the hunter rattles off several place names. The length of the list makes Thomas’s stomach drop.

“We’ll expect you at the village in a fortnight,” the hunter says, and his voice does little to mask the fact that he’s not too pleased with the prospect.

Good thing, then, that Thomas did not get as far as he did by being a people-pleaser, even if “far” at the moment is constituted of having volunteering to herd a man-eating, ill-tempered, smelly genius loci. He nods to the hunters, and claps Tuungaq on the shoulder. “Come on, boy, we are going home.”

That is not completely true, of course. He does not have a home, but he has a companion, and home, to Thomas, was always more of a verb than a noun, something you can make if need be. 

When they put the distance Tuungaq deems safe between themselves and the hunters, who stayed behind to perform the last rights over the shaman, the monster unceremoniously dumps Thomas on the ice and produces the most outlandish performance. The creature—centuries of history, rancour and anger, red in tooth and claw—races in circles around him like a pup, sending ice splinters flying from under his paws. He tumbles over snowdrifts, wagging his entire body, and then burrows into the ice faster than Thomas has ever seen, bursting out to the surface a dozen feet to the side in a cascade of snow and ice. The monster’s playing, he realizes. With a yelp, he slides down one burrow to follow it, a long breathless fall into the shimmering dark impossibly far below, and the creature catches him.

*

And so, they fall into a routine. Tuungaq takes him to the village, little more than a hunting outpost, really, in the early hours, and skulks huffily in the hills nearby while the local dogs bark and strain against their tethers. Thomas wishes Tuungaq would stay with him, to make sure that he doesn’t forget anything too crucial, if nothing else, but the monster is adamant about keeping his distance, and besides, he makes the villagers nervous. Thomas’s changing roster of teachers eye him with suspicion and disdain that morphs into pity as their uneasy tutelage slowly develops into a friendship none of them quite expected.

Despite the barely masked sympathy of Thomas’s teachers, him staying with Tuungaq is no sacrifice on his part. No matter how warm a hut, and how cordial a conversation, there’s always a clock in his head ticking off minutes until Tuungaq saunters closer to the village to pick him up. Maybe his teachers’ sympathy is not for any imagined sacrifice, he thinks, but rather for his strange disposition: sympathy for an odd misfitting thing. After all, when Thomas walks out to meet Tuungaq halfway on his new, much sturdier crutches, there’s always a traitorous smile on his lips.

It’s just that he ends up pressed against Tuungaq for hours on end during their rides across the ice, he tells himself, the monster’s long spine shifting and moving between his legs, and the body ultimately doesn’t differentiate between sorts of pressure: a rub’s a rub. They are also pressed up against one another for hours on end in the burrow: the thing sleeps rarely and even then for short slivers of time, but allows Thomas his rest, pillowing him on strong paws. It’s little wonder that his prick would jump to conclusions and misinterpret that feeling of safety. And yet, there’s his tell-tale smile that he cannot wipe no matter how hard he tries, a smile that would tell the entire sordid tale to anybody who knew him.

And that, possibly, is the one good thing about the fact that none who knew him are there to document the changes in him. Tuungaq and he have made the rounds of all the places the hunter mentioned, burying the bodies where there were few enough to improvise a mound, or where inedible chunks that didn’t require a large grave were all that was left; burning them where there were too many. They don’t find all of them, Thomas notes, unless the few stragglers still unaccounted for did not just wander too far off into the hills to be found. He reminds himself to keep scouring the land come spring, or the spring after that, marveling at his own audacity for daring to think in such historically long eras when days, or hours even, were the best he could hope for not that long ago. And in the meantime, swaddled in the soft fur and scooped up against and a large body rising and falling in a soft sleepy rhythm, he dares to hope that his friends are as warm and safe as he is, wherever their road has taken them.

He thought he would dream of what he saw in the skeletal camps they visited; he doesn’t. What he does dream of is not a considerable improvement for his peace of mind though. The night hours are filled with shifting, squelching, roiling, writhing images: of Tuungaq’s tongue lapping ever closer to his private parts, of being stretched, of cold air burning his skin in perfect counterpoint to the searing touches of his monster. He wakes up vaguely ashamed, and yearning for more, awaiting settling against Tuungaq for the night and drifting off into his restless dreams from the moment he rises in the morning.

The physical impossibility of it baffles him, but not overmuch. As any boy stuck up in the crow's nest for hours on end would tell you, sailors are no strangers to ingenuity when it comes to sticking a square peg into a round hole, or vice versa, both literally and metaphorically. But the present dilemma stumps even his experienced mind. For one, he is not even that sure if his sweetheart is a he or a she, not that he's picky. He has a fleeting feeling that, as these things go, it being a boy would pose less of a problem than it being an outsized bear-shaped ice demon.

The matter comes to a head, as it were, when he wakes up, still aching from the thrusting weight of Tuungaq in a dream, hoping that the monster would be asleep and blithely unaware of his embarrassment, and sees it watching him with narrowed eyes. Thomas tries to shift away from the warm bulk, but Tuungaq stretches his neck and presses his nose to the bulge in Thomas’s drawers.

“It happens,” he grumbles, mortification giving way to irritation with Tuungaq’s bluntness. “I put up with your atrocious table manners and have the right to expect equal courtesy in other matters.”

Tuungaq doesn’t budge, breathing in with relish, and Thomas’s cock-stand, quite against his will, grows even more painful with the contact. He moves his hand to push the snout away, but when his palm is within inches of the monster’s forehead, something lashes around his wrist. He strains against the force pulling his hand away, in surprise more than anything, and touches the thing holding his right hand with the fingers of his left. It is warm, smooth, leathery to the touch, about an inch in diameter and God knows how long; he only has time to follow it to where it starts to disappear in Tuungaq’s fur before another one winds around his left wrist and stops his progression.

“Neptune’s balls,” he breathes out as yet more of these feelers make short work of pulling his drawers down. Despite the thrill of horror underpinning the oddity of it all, his cock-stand doesn’t flag one bit, even as a feeler hesitantly probes its length from the tip to the root, finally winding around it and staying there.

Meanwhile, another one musses his hair before coming to rest on his ear. The image of it trying to have congress with his ear, scrambling his brains in the process, makes Thomas’s blood run cold, and he thrashes in its grip until the feeler finally releases his right hand. He hastily bats an offensive thing away from his head.

“Oy, for an ancient demon, you really should have developed a more solid understanding of the human anatomy,” he grumbles, before covering his cock-stand, and the thing on it, with his hand, and giving himself several decisive pulls. “This is how it’s done, unless you want to end up with one dead sailor by the end of it.”

The slithering, shifting, winding pressure is overpoweringly odd, he’s got to admit, yet not unpleasant. Tuungaq watches his face with almost painful attention usually reserved for hunting, flicking his ears in excitement when Thomas throws his head back in a moan as the feeler slides against the sensitive spot just below the tip. Before he can close his mouth, more feelers push past his lips, pressing unceremoniously on the tongue.

Thomas gags with the forgotten sensation, and the things retreat but not withdraw altogether, hovering just past his teeth. Experimentally, he runs his tongue across them, surprised that they don’t taste like anything much. There’s none of the brine he usually associates with the sensation, just skin. He glances up at Tuungaq, only to see his eyes blown wide with surprise. If this is strange for him, it seems equally unfamiliar for his creature.

“I have not the foggiest what told you this would be a good idea,” he informs both his creature and himself at once, and yet his dick is rock-hard, which rather calls the truth of his words into question.

As if taking that as a cue, yet another of the feelers (how many of them are there? he wonders. And how come he never noticed them before?) slides down, briefly fondling his balls before pausing at his entrance. Instantly, he imagines all too vividly it plunging in too deep, or too fast, or with altogether too many appendages: the size that seemed titillating in his dreams is more than likely to spell his doom outside them. In principle, becoming a cautionary tale passed down through generations seems like a venerable way to go, but in practice, he’d rather postpone that moment for as long as possible.

“Slow,” he hisses as the movements of the feeler on his dick become faster and more insistent. “Easy does it.”

Tuungaq obeys, at least for a while, rubbing at his entrance while working his dick with a talent that would doubtlessly make some doxies of Thomas’s acquaintance teary with envy. He reaches with his free hand and pulls Tuungaq’s head closer, hugging him to his chest and breathing in his smell: wet fur, and blood, and an even more horrifying hint of something completely alien and indifferent. This is what time smells like, Thomas thinks frantically as the muscles of his thighs begin to tremble in a premonition of his climax: time frozen to a standstill.

Right as he teeters on the edge, a feeler pushes into him, halting him a split second away from spending. The feeler doesn’t have the girth to make the stretch painful, and yet the feeling of the moving squirming length pulsing in and out of him is too odd to be altogether pleasant. He spreads his thighs wider to accommodate it, and another one of these appendages instantly joins the first, prying him open with methodical care. Thomas breathes in deeply through his nose and breathes out through his mouth, willing himself to ride the edge of danger and pain. Tuungaq shifts against him, wet tongue licking at his throat, pausing over the frantic pulse in carotid. This, at least, is familiar, so Thomas focuses for the moment on that, until the feelers in his arse find the spot that makes him arch and swear.

He reaches for his dick with his free hand, but the moment he touches the feeler on it, the grip on his wrist returns. He growls with frustration.

“Just helpin-”

The words are cut short by what feels like another of the things pushing into him. The muscles there convulse, but there’s no give in the pressure. Slowly at first, then more frantically, the feeler on his cock resumes its ministrations in counterpoint to the pulsing inside him, pressing on the sensitive spot when the one on his dick slides down to the root, giving him reprieve when that one drags across the tip. He feels like a glove, empty, stretched snug over a vibrant living warmth, filled from the inside, moulded into a shape that makes sense. 

“Yes,” he breathes out, “yes, ii-” the Inuktitut word for _yes_ turning into a breathless yelp on his tongue, the sound lasting impossibly long, weaving and reverberating, it seems, through the ice, becoming a part of the landscape as his seed paints Tuungaq’s fur.

*

Winter turns to spring, and spring melts into summer. Hunting is plentiful this season, his friends from the village report, bringing him packages of cured deer meat and local water fowl, almost too bony to justify the effort of eating it, unless you can swallow it whole the way Tuungaq does. As the two of them wander along the shore, Thomas realizes that the sight of leads in the ice, not that long ago yearned for more than a nun yearns for an amenable gardener at her convent, look like an oddity to is eyes, a jarring irregularity in the pristine landscape. He is becoming a creature of the ice.

It’s Tuungaq who notices the whaler first, or at least he is the first to admit it. Blanky was perfectly happy to turn a blind eye to the odd blot on the horizon and let feigned ignorance deliver him from the necessity of making a choice. As it is, Tuungaq crouches down and lets Thomas slide off his back, then nudges him towards the water with his broad nose. While Thomas stares uncomprehendingly at the jot far out at sea, the monster sniffs the air and turns back inland with barely a rustle of shale under its paws.

“Are you mad?” Thomas yells, turning with far less elegance and command than he’s used to.

Tuungaq pauses, then takes a careful step back to him. These small stones are really not made for walking on crutches, Thomas thinks, moving towards him; maybe they should investigate other stretches of the shore. When they finally come up close, he clamps the crutch under his armpit, reaches up and grabs Tuungaq by his small ears, which, as he now knows, are ticklish, and presses their faces together, forehead to forehead.

“The fuck are you thinking?” he growls: not as persuasively, in all likelihood, as Tuungaq can, but he’s getting better at this. “No way are you going to get rid of me. I got the taste for living my life as an insult. A devil-shagging, ice-humping, one-legged bastard, how’d that sound?” He switches to English for that, because some things will always sound more heartfelt in his native tongue, but he trusts Tuungaq to understand enough. “All told, I’m living my best life.”

And as he says that, he realizes that it’s true, or true enough. Much as he likes sticking dynamite in the ice, he loves the ice, end of: watching it live, wax, wane, break and die. Much as he sometimes misses the rhetorical flourishes of a good joke or a well-constructed insult, he is content with his present conversations: admittedly, awkward hobbling affairs that often fall into the cracks between human and animal, and between humans of very different mores and customs; but then, awkward and hobbling describes him too, down to a t. And much as he might miss the comprehensibility of sharing a bed with a human person, he sure can appreciate the uses of extra limbs his present bedfellow has. He clambers onto Tuungaq’s back, marvelling at how easy it has become with practice, and steers him deeper into the flats of the island.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all the patient & kindly souls who read along and commented (and, no doubt, laughed as what was supposed to be a short PWP grew into 10K of, um, whatever this is). Y'all's comments made my day <3


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